That's fair, but before computers, not much was available for free. Getting a newspaper would generally cost money, as would using the payphone to communicate, as would so many other things that are now freely available. So, while its definitely a problem, as long as it's cheap enough for "most" people to afford it, then I think we aren't really regressing?
Perhaps if we consider information on the internet to be vital to daily life, a program like food stamps could be implemented? It sounds rather over engineered but it's the only idea I've ever heard for working around the "privacy is only for the wealthy" concern.
Doing that for a binary release that is in dozens of platforms, configurations, locales, etc. is incredibly time consuming. Uptake on binaries is also usually on the order of days-weeks before most of your user base is up to date. It's easier for say a website or service that can deploy to millions of users within minutes.
The problem there is February 1st isn't always a good release day, say if it's a Saturday. So you'd ship on the 2nd or 3rd sometimes... or sometimes that's a holiday, or there are validate reasons to avoid a period (like the first ~week of July or September). You could try to pick something like the "2nd Wednesday" of the month, but there are still occasions for mid-week holidays and other timing problems related to marketing or external events (other announcements, or world events that would clobber your marketing push). Inevitably you have to plan it anyway, so you might as well do that from the start.
The amount of work to improve Firefox for Android basically meant a rewrite was needed, hence Firefox Preview being the eventually replacement when it's fully ready
I’m not the person you were replying to, but the single feature that keeps me out of Firefox is their lack of AppleScript support. I (and many other automators) use AppleScript daily, multiple times a day, to control aspects of Chrome and Safari. The fact that I can’t do the same with Firefox puts it completely out of consideration.
Aren’t they then still playing catch-up with Chrome et al instead of doing something new and innovative.
Firefox’s add-ons were influential in spawning today’s App Stores. They introduced tabbed browsing. A JavaScript console and DOM manipulation tools. Internet Explorer had nothing like it, which is why Firefox so quickly caught on.
Innovative features don’t matter if the basic ones I need aren’t present. If Firefox introduced the innovation of tabs[1] but couldn’t render pages, tabs would have been useless.
I wasn’t proposing that implementing AppleScript will shoot up Firefox’s market share, just that until they do, I (and others that care deeply about automation) won’t even look in its general direction as a serious contender to being the main browser.
Android performance, scrolling etc. still isn't up to par. Firefox has ublock origin, cookie auto-delete, containers etc. I don't know if any other open android browser offers these. And that's huge. If they get it up to par, and make some deals with OEMs to bundle firefox, that should help adoption.
I mean they wanted to build an entire phone OS, and get OEMs to ship that. Shipping a browser should be more manageable, don't you think ?
>2. Most of those OEMs are already bundling Chrome in order to get the Play Store.
Exactly. Most OEMs bundle chrome + other third party browsers depending on their deals and motivations. The play store contract doesn't prevent them from bundling additional browsers.
I don't think too much about browsers but things I could think of are speed, adblock, automation, dev tools. Or they could offer something like Electron but better or a Node competitor based on their tech. They could improve their mobile offerings.
It seems they are mainly following Chrome these days.
